Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of marketing online, and when done well, it can greatly increase your traffic of interested people. SEO is a multi-faceted “thing” and it’s easy to get distracted by only one or two ranking factors such as speed or word count. In the process, you’ll lose sight of the purpose and may see less than wonderful results. So a good understanding of what is SEO, and what isn’t, will help you make wiser decisions as you seek lower-cost ways to drive store growth. This article offers the foundation knowledge you need to do your own optimization or to ask good questions of anyone you hire.

What is SEO and Why It’s Crucial for eCommerce

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of optimizing the technical aspects and content of a website to rank higher in search engine results.  This process makes it more visible via the search engines to potential customers. Store owners should not skip the SEO effort.  SEO is crucial because it directly influences the amount of organic traffic, or non-paid visitors, that your website receives. Higher visibility in search results means more potential customers discovering your products, which can lead to increased sales.

SEO involves various strategies, including optimizing website content with relevant keywords, improving site speed, ensuring mobile-friendliness, and building quality inbound links. For eCommerce sites, SEO is essential because it helps your product pages rank higher in search results, making them more likely to be found by shoppers.

Good SEO practices improve search engine rankings and enhance the user experience by making your site easier to navigate and more engaging. The first rule of SEO, write for the buyer/shopper – not the search engines. Over time, effective SEO can reduce your reliance on paid advertising, making it a cost-effective strategy for long-term growth. In a competitive online market, strong SEO is essential for staying ahead of competitors and reaching customers who are actively searching for products like yours.

The Economic Benefits of SEO for Online Stores

Initially, the costs of SEO can exceed the immediate economic return, but over time, it can become one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies for online stores. SEO primarily focuses on optimizing the written content of your website, which can be both time-consuming and costly.

However, if you invest in creating high-quality, thorough articles and product descriptions, SEO can eventually become a low-cost method of driving traffic. This is because, unlike paid advertising, which requires continuous spending, SEO builds organic visibility that can generate traffic long after the initial investment.

For eCommerce, the economic benefits of SEO are significant. It helps differentiate your store in a crowded market, especially if you’re competing against numerous other stores selling similar products. By optimizing your site for relevant keywords, improving user experience, and creating unique content, you increase your chances of ranking higher in search results, attracting more customers, and ultimately boosting sales. Over time, the return on investment (ROI) from SEO can surpass other marketing channels, making it an essential strategy for sustainable growth and long-term profitability in the competitive online marketplace.

Common SEO Pitfalls to Avoid in eCommerce

When optimizing your eCommerce site for SEO, there are several common pitfalls to avoid that can negatively impact your search rankings and overall success.

1. Low-Quality or Spammy Links: Acquiring inbound links from low-quality or irrelevant websites can lead to penalties from Google, potentially causing your site to disappear from search results. It’s crucial to build links gradually and ensure they come from reputable, relevant sources.
2. Focusing Solely on Search Engines: Designing and writing content primarily for search engines, rather than for your customers, can harm user experience. If your visitors find your site difficult to navigate or unengaging, they are less likely to make a purchase, lowering your conversion rates.
3. Over-Optimization: Keyword stuffing, excessive internal linking, and other over-optimization tactics can trigger penalties. SEO should be natural and user-focused.
4. Neglecting Technical SEO: Technical errors such as slow site speed, broken links, and poor mobile optimization can hurt your SEO and frustrate users. Regularly audit your site for technical issues to maintain a seamless user experience and strong search engine rankings.
5. Your Site Should be Well-optimized for Conversions: Spelling and grammatical errors should be fixed. Navigation should be smart. Images should be excellent and products should list all details of the product. A poorly made site destroys trust and without trust, even good content will struggle to make a site visitor a customer.

By avoiding these pitfalls, you can ensure a more effective and sustainable eCommerce SEO strategy.

Measuring the Success of Your SEO Efforts

SEO is also often misunderstood. It can be judged as “how do I rank for these 10 terms.” However, this is the wrong way to view search engine traffic. The end goal is to drive traffic. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of search queries that can result in someone seeing a link to your website and a site visit. This is not fully predictable.

Search engine results are personalized by the search engines and a given term will fluctuate in rank on a moment-to-moment basis based on more than 200 factors. “Googling” your key terms, from your computer, in your geography, will often deliver a higher SERP result. Google Search Console is a free, valuable tool that tells you which queries your website displays for. It lists average rank position and click-through rates. Search Console is one of the most valuable free SEO tools.

It can also take quite a bit of time to rank well for selected search queries. SEO is often the “season and simmer” part of your marketing efforts. Anyone offering SEO services or “programs” that guarantee to zip your site to the top of the Google rankings is one to be very, very wary of. Plan on at least six months of effort before determining success.

The way to judge search engine optimization is to measure whether or not your organic traffic is growing. An increase in traffic coming in on your brand terms is also an important metric.

Components of an SEO campaign

An appropriately conducted SEO campaign, defined as one that can withstand the scrutiny of, and algorithm changes made by, Google, center around content. While all forms of content, including images, on-site reviews, and videos all enhance SEO, written words are most important. Some of the SEO work is on your site, and some of it occurs offsite.

Search engine optimization is a fairly complex. Many components comprise a solid SEO effort but all can be classified into one of three areas of effort.

This is why I find the 3-leg stool to be a good analogy. Skip or short a leg and your search engine results (SERP) falls.

Search optimization efforts fall into one of three categories –

1. Technical optimizations of the website – including the navigational plan, speed, meta information, engine submission and more
2. Content – both onsite and, as part of a link campaign, written for offsite use
3. Links – both internal to the site and coming from elsewhere (external links)

Remember, Google’s goal is to deliver the best results that answer the question (query) the user is asking.

The purpose of search optimization work is to highlight to Google that your page offers one of the very best results that answer the question the customer is asking.

Technical requirements – Onsite SEO

While it is possible for a website to rank well with a poorly designed and constructed website, there are specific technical requirements that improve rankings and organic traffic.

• Your website must be optimized for speed and user experience.
• Navigation and on-site search need to be optimized for ease of use.
• URLS, meta descriptions, page headings, robots.txt and sitemap files, and canonical links must be correct.
• Code needs to be clean and open graph tags installed.
• On site pages need to offer high quality, authoritative content that includes relevant keywords AND related semantic language. Ideally all blog pages are a minimum of 500 words. Longer is better.
• Duplicate content must be addressed.
• Site must be secured.
• Sitemaps need to be connected to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• An internal link strategy that links related content to increase authority for a given topic.
• Newer requirements are properly set up schema markup which help Google define the content on your pages. While not a “must have,” you’re hurting your visibility without it.

Just keep in mind, your website should be designed and built to make your customers happy and to move visitors into and through the buying funnel. All the the technical requirements of SEO benefit your customers.

Content needs

Content is defined here as everything you do to represent your brand and products. This includes product descriptions, images, videos, category descriptions, guides, blogs, social media posts, emails and more. Content is the most critical element of your website as, in addition to hopefully assisting your search goals, it informs, guides and leads your viewers to purchase items from you.

Your content is far more valuable than its SEO value. Good content guides the decision process and builds trust. Both of which can increase conversion rates. Great content is shared. Content shared puts your name and products in front of more people. Share content is naturally created inbound links.

Google also looks to see how page visitors respond to your page. The more engaged they are, the better the content must be. The visitor who spends more time on your page, watches the video, checks all your images, or even better “adds to cart,” the more favorably Google sees that page as a top response to the query. Thus inbound links may get someone to the page, but if the visitor isn’t impressed once they arrive, they quickly leave, in Google terms “bounce.” A high bounce rate is a negative factor for SEO.

Thin content can actually prevent your product page from being indexed at all. If Google sees more code than content, the odds are against you.

I have seen many sites, that otherwise break the rules for SEO best practices, rank really well because their content is fabulous.

Among the content a good site needs:

• Onsite SEO – Web copy for your website, including a blog, that features high quality written content on topics your target audience is seeking information on. Copy must also meet technical requirements that help get it indexed higher but ultimately the most important factor is that it engages your audience.
• Offsite SEO – Articles, videos, social media content, infographics and blog comments written on other sites, authored by your team, that link in to yours.
• Offsite SEO – Articles written on other sites that link in to your site. Authorship belongs to the other site even if content is written by your team.

The challenge of ecommerce

SEO is easier if you are the brand and all the product on your website is your brand. It’s harder when you sell other brands as there are other stores vying for top SERP. Ideally your website has custom written product descriptions. This can be a huge project if you have a large product catalog. In truth, ranking high for a product page is much harder than an informative blog post or educational page. Not all stores, even large ones, do well creating great, unique product pages. They trade off their brand recognition and trust. If you don’t have that brand power, your page must go the extra mile to deliver a great experience.

Crafting a great product description page

A great product page is one way smaller merchants can stand out from their competition and improve their SEO while also improving conversion rates. Visitors who reach a great page are more likely to engage with the page, look around, visit other pages on site and buy. All of which are signals to Google that your page is a worthy destination.

• Answer all their questions. Minimize the need for the customer to visit many sites to learn what they need to know before buying.
• Make the product look fabulous. Whenever possible, offer multiple views, photos with all options and videos.
• Reviews. Product reviews are a “must have” in today’s market where buyers like social proof that something is worth their money.
• Pretty and efficient. Your page should look clean and have information formatted in easy to read bites.
• Add video content. If there’s a great video out there, show it! If you created the content, that’s even better. If you’re using YouTube, you should have a programmer set up your site so the description, and end slide where it links to other people’s videos (which takes them off YOUR site) is not displayed.
• Keep out useless information. You don’t need to say everything on one page. In fact, rule #1 of ecommerce is that “people don’t read.” Keep your page clean and free of distractions. There is some evidence that the addition of up-sells and cross sells actually decrease conversions. I would test this theory before assuming it to be fact for your audience.

Links – internal and inbound (external)

Internal links are the links that exist within your website that take a site visitor, and a crawler, from page to page. A well-designed internal linking strategy makes it easier for your visitors to get to the information they need. It also links related topics and items which can support the relevancy and search rankings for a given page.

External links are an area where you need to exercise care to acquire them in an intelligent and natural manner. All sites will have a few poor inbound links over time. A limited quantity of poor links is not a major cause for concern. If you see a lot of spammy links, you will need to either have those inbound links removed (contact the site owner), or disavow them. Disavow is a process where you tell Google you did not want that link and don’t count it. It’s a tool built into the Google Search Console.

If your website has outstanding content and is technically well-designed, why do you still need inbound links? Google views inbound links as the equivalent of a product review. It is someone else’s opinion that your web page answers the specific query well. The more “sites” that think you have the best answer, the more validation. While Google’s algorithms change frequently, the influence of inbound links remains one of the most important factors for SERP ranking. For this reason, it’s also an area that is subject to abusive practices. Google is aware of this which is why the quality of who links to you matters.

After more than 8 years of SEO work, I have found that by following this one rule for inbound links, websites withstand the many Google changes and none of the sites I’ve worked on have been penalized.

Rule of Thumb: Ask yourself “Would a visitor on this site, and clicking this link, be interested in the page linked?” Traffic to your website is worthless if that traffic is not interested in what you offer. Build links where the audience is likely to be interested in your content and products. Stay away when it isn’t a relevant topic.

• Quality, defined as reputable and trusted by Google, inbound links are still among the most important factors that determine how well your site will rank.
• Links from poor-quality sources can actually cause your site to be penalized by Google.
• A wide variety of types of links – which includes a variety of sites, linking keywords, image and video links, follow and no-follow links that follow a “natural” pattern should be present.
• Social media inbound links and content shares also factor in.

How to acquire relevant inbound links

There are as many ways to create and acquire inbound links as there are people who call themselves SEO experts. “Best” is defined as the most appropriate and effective for your website. There is an art to blogger and website outreach. Your request must provide benefits to their website and audience. Just be sure that sites are high quality, ideally have a higher domain authority than yours, and are relevant to your business.

Inbound link campaigns rarely result in immediate spikes of traffic. However, results compound over time. The result should be visible within a 3-6 month time period. For this reason, a six-month minimum time commitment is recommended for any inbound linking campaigns.

updated August 2024